Retrofitting a Language-Processing Application for Unicode - A Case Study
Richard Gillam, Senior Software Developer, Language Analysis Systems, Inc., USA
Intended Audience: Programmers, Systems Analysts, Technical Managers
Session Level: Beginner, Intermediate
Let's say you have an existing application that manipulates text, but it doesn't use Unicode for its text representation.看 Why would you want to retrofit it to use Unicode?看 How would you go about doing that?看 This talk looks at one company's answers to these questions.看 Language Analysis Systems, Inc. (LAS) is a company whose whole product line deals with analyzing and manipulating text: It produces a line of code libraries that perform analysis and linguistic matching of personal names.看 But when the author joined LAS, its entire product line was exclusively ASCII- based.看 This talk will examine the historical reasons for that and explore the various technical challenges LAS has faced in its bid to world-enable its product line and the solutions to those challenges that LAS is adopting.